MOJITO Woody's Rescue is a cube-shaped cat aiming straight at the Banjo-Kazooie hole in your library

Modern 3D platformers tend to pick one mode and commit. Open-world like Super Mario Odyssey. Linear like Astro Bot. Side-scrolling like Donkey Kong Country Returns. MOJITO Woody’s Rescue refuses the choice. Solo developer Guillem Tenza, working under the studio name GTZAStudio, is building all three into one game, plus rail-car runs and character customization, with a cube-shaped cat as the lead and an evil cucumber as the villain.

The pitch is straightforward collectathon comfort food. Mojito, a boxy 3D cat, teams up with Lana, a literal ball of yarn, to rescue his dog friend Woody from a vegetable that turned heel. The personal layer underneath the premise is the part that’s easy to miss. Mojito and Woody aren’t invented mascots. Mojito is Tenza’s actual cat in real life, and Woody is his dog. The whole game is a tribute to his two pets. The cucumber-as-villain is the giveaway: anyone who’s seen the internet’s classic cat-meets-cucumber prank videos knows exactly why a cat-led platformer was always going to cast a vegetable as the antagonist.

On top of that, the scope is wider than it looks. Three flavors of platformer live in the same game: open-world hubs, linear 3D stages, and 2.5D side-scrolling. The references read exactly like you’d guess from a single screenshot: Super Mario 64, Odyssey, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country.

The official trailer is the fastest way to read where this is going. The camera flips between sandbox hub, linear corridor, and 2.5D side run inside the same minute, and the character animation does the heavy lifting that a cube-shaped cat shouldn’t logically be able to pull off.

Three platformer modes in one project

The structural bet here is the unusual part. Most platformers fail in transitions. Going from open hub to linear stage to side-scrolling section usually breaks pacing, breaks controls, or breaks visual identity. GTZAStudio is leaning into it as a feature.

Sandbox levels do the Mario 64 thing. You enter a self-contained world, you poke around, you collect, you leave when you want. Linear 3D stages push the Odyssey kingdom or Astro Bot corridor approach, with a defined start, end, and tighter platforming beats. 2.5D sections flatten the camera into Donkey Kong Country territory for pure precision runs. On top of that, wagon levels let you rush through a rail-car sequence or slow down and explore the same track.

It’s an ambitious spread for a single project, and the smart read is that none of these modes have to carry the whole game on their own. Each one gets to play to its strengths, and the variety keeps the pacing from grinding flat the way single-mode platformers can.

Lana is the moveset, not a sidekick

The other thing worth flagging is how the yarn-ball partner is framed. Lana isn’t a pet that follows you around for cute points. She’s the moveset expansion. The game describes her as a partner who opens new traversal and exploration options the deeper you go.

If that lands the way it reads, this is closer to how Banjo-Kazooie layered Kazooie’s abilities on top of Banjo’s than to a Yoshi-style companion. You don’t gain a new button. You gain a new verb. Each verb unlocks parts of older levels you couldn’t reach before, which is exactly the loop that makes a collectathon worth revisiting.

The customization layer sits on top of that. Color palettes, patterns, and textures let you reskin Mojito as you go. Tenza has explicitly framed this as a feature for players who own cats: you can dress the in-game Mojito up to look like your own pet, the same way he based the original character on his. In a genre where the character is on screen 100% of the time, that personalization is the kind of detail that keeps a long playthrough feeling fresh.

Status, scope, and how to keep an eye on it

There’s no release date yet. Tenza handles both development and publishing under GTZAStudio, which is unusual for a project at this scope. This is also his second game with the same cast, following an earlier puzzle title featuring Mojito the cat. The Steam page lists full localization planned across ten languages, which is a heavy translation bill for any solo dev and usually signals real commitment rather than a side project.

Tenza is publicly active on X as @GtzaStudio, plus YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, and a dedicated subreddit at r/mojitowoodysrescue, which is the right place to track build updates and trailer drops between now and a release window.

Show some love

Pulling back from the systems, the thing that lands hardest is how much one person is making look easy. The animation is bouncy, the palettes are loud in the best way, and the whole project carries that handmade-toy feeling you used to get from late-90s Nintendo. There’s Yoshi’s Story in the textures, Kirby’s Epic Yarn in the way Lana actually unspools as she moves, and Mario 64 in the camera and the joy. None of those references feel borrowed. They feel earned.

Wishlist this one to show some love. A solo dev animating his own cat into a sandbox platformer is exactly the kind of project that runs on small signals from strangers, and it’s worth giving.

For other recent indies worth tracking, the Remain At Your Desk discovery and our Besmirch early access coverage are the catch-up reads.